How To Recover Lost Documents and Spreadsheets After Disk Formatting?

Hetman Office Recovery, as well as the two other products, offers a carefully designed and fully guided step by step wizard. Recovering documents with any of these tools becomes literally a walkthrough. By simply making a few simple choices you’ll complete the recovery process successfully in no time.

The first step of a data recovery process is specifying the disk that contains the files to recover. There is a difference between specifying a disk volume (drive letter, or logical disk) and selecting a physical device.

Logical Drive

Choose one of the available logical disks (disk volumes, drive letters) if you are about to undelete files you’ve just deleted, or if you are recovering files after a minor accident (e.g. the file was corrupted during a power outage, but you can still access the disk or partition).

Physical Device

If you are recovering from a major accident (e.g. the disk or a USB flash drive is no longer readable), or if you are about to recover files from a formatted or repartitioned hard drive, you may select a physical device. Hetman Office Recovery will scan the entire device, locating recoverable files with low-level scan.

Finally, you can use the “Disk search” function to discover disk volumes on a given physical device. This is the best choice if you are recovering after a major accident and lost access to the original partition.

Searching For Deleted Partitions

When in Comprehensive Analysis mode, Hetman Office Recovery makes use of information obtained from the disk surface as well as acquired from the file system. In order to be able to analyze the file system, the tool will need access to logical disk volumes (partitions). If a serious accident happened, and you can no longer see the original drive letters, you’ll need to perform a search for deleted partitions.

To start the search, select a physical device in the folder tree and use the Options – Find Disks command. You can specify the file system and approximate location on the device. You can also search the entire device looking for all types of file systems (recommended).

By default, Hetman Office Recovery will use a fast algorithm to locate partitions. If this mode does not identify all the original partitions, you can repeat the search in comprehensive mode. All discovered partitions will be added to the list of logical disks available for analysis.

Before You Begin

More often than not, recently deleted files are still available somewhere on your disk. Moreover, if you’re about to recover a working copy of a document, you’ll probably see more copies and versions of that very same file than you could imagine.

Even if you managed to format the disk (which is unlikely), format or corrupt a USB thumb drive (which is much more likely), the content of your files will be still stored there until eventually they get overwritten with other data.

For you, this means two things. First, your documents are recoverable until it gets overwritten by other data. Second, you’ll have to act fast before that happens!

Before you begin downloading, installing or using a data recovery tool, make sure you understand the following very clearly. Never, ever save, download or install anything onto the disk containing the files you are about to recover! Remember we told you the files you deleted are only there until overwritten with other data? Well, the data recovery tool you download and install is exactly that “other data” that can ruin your recovery attempt before you even begin.

So let’s make it very clear: you must use a different disk to download and install the data recovery tool to. And if the documents you are about to recover happen to reside on the system disk, well… use a USB thumb drive to install the data recovery tool. And better yet, use a different computer to prepare that thumb drive, then insert the drive into the PC that holds your files and keep going.

Virtual Disk Images

Virtual disk images offer the safest possible recovery experience. In this mode, the tool will read the entire content of a device containing the documents to be recovered in one long read operation to create a bit precise virtual image of the drive.

By accessing the original storage device in contiguous mode, Hetman Office Recovery is minimizing the number of magnetic head movements and reducing the chance of premature disk failure to absolute minimum. This mode is often used when recovering from heavily worn hard drives, physically damaged and unstable storage devices. With a virtual image of the disk, you will no longer require the original storage device to recover information.

Creating a Virtual Drive Image

You will need to exit the Recovery Wizard to work with virtual drive images. To create a virtual drive image, use the Options – Create Virtual Disk command from the main menu. You can either capture an image of the entire disk surface or specify initial sector and volume size. You can shrink the content of the device by enabling the compression option.

Using Virtual Drive Images

To make use of an existing virtual drive image, use the Options – Mount Disk command and select the disk image file from the dialog. Hetman Office Recovery will automatically add the disk into the folder tree. You will be able to select this disk when using the Recovery Wizard.

Note: if required, you can capture a virtual disk image on one computer and perform the recovery on another PC.